nd they spent without stint of blood and happiness for
high aim. When Canada lost ground in the progress of the nations, as
in the corrupt days of Bigot's rule during the French regime, or the
equally corrupt days of _the family compact_ after the Conquest, it was
because the altar fires of her ideals were allowed to burn low.

It has been said that the past is but a rear light marking the back
trail of the ship's passage. Say rather it is the search light on the
ship's prow, pointing the way over the waters.

[Illustration: FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION, 1867. (From the painting by
Robert Hariss)]

To-day Canada is in the very vanguard of the nations. Her wheat fields
fill the granaries of the world; and to her ample borders come the
peoples of earth's ends, bringing tribute not of incense and
frankincense as of old, but of manhood and strength, of push and lift,
of fire and hope and enthusiasm and the daring that conquers all the
difficulties of life; bringing too, all the outworn vices of an Old
World, all the vicious instincts of the powers that prey in the Under
World. Canada's prosperity is literally overflowing from a cornucopia
of super-abundant plenty. Will her constitution, wrested from
political and civil strife; will her moral stamina, bred from the
heroism of an heroic past, stand the strain, the tremendous strain of
the {437} new conditions? Will she assimilate the strange new
peoples--strange in thought and life and morals--coming to her borders?
Will she eradicate their vices like the strong body of a healthy
constitution throwing off disease; or will she be poisoned by the
toxins of vicious traits inherited from centuries of vicious living?
Will she remake the men, regenerate the aliens, coming to her hearth
fire; or will they drag her down to their degeneracy? Above all, will
she stand the strain, the tremendous strain, of prosperity, and the
corruption that is attendant on prosperity? _Quien sabe_? Let him
answer who can; and the question is best answered by watching the
criminal calendar. (Is the percentage of convictions as certain and
relentless as under the old regime? What manner of crimes is growing
up in the land?) And the question may be answered, too, by watching
whether the press and platform and pulpit stand as everlastingly and
relentlessly for sharp demarkation between right and wrong, for the
sharp demarkation between truth, plain truth, and intentional
mendacity, as under the